Our Life List

   We are assembling our Life List, a list of all the birds we have observed in our entire life. Cobbled together from hundreds of birding trips, several birding vacations, and our personal sightings, this will be quite an enormous list.

   We don't obsess about making lists of the birds we see, as much as we did in the beginning. That is why we have left to now the task of creating such a list for this website.

   I think we have both gotten away from needing to see a spectacular, championship bird to be satisfied with our birding experience. I do remember the amazing Snail Kite (Rostrhamus sociabilis) that we spotted in the Everglades; it had a beautifully curled beak, well-suited to opening snails, its primary food source. The handsomest bird I've ever seen was an orange and black Bat Falcon (Falco rufigularis) in the jungles of Calakmul Biosphere in the Yucatan.

Bat Falcon

   Now we are interested in bird behavior and the everyday life of birds. But this can quickly get somewhat competitative too, only because we have birded long enough to have seen some quite exotic birdic phenomenon.

   In Northern Mississippi, right behind a casino, we witnessed the mating dance of the Pileated Woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus). Two Pileated Woodpeckers did a peek-a-boo dance as they moved up and down on either sides of a large tree limb. They were oblivious of us and we were only thirty feet away. We had no camera, but we had binoculars. People can bird their entire lives and never see the mating dance of the Pileated Woodpecker. We have been lucky.


   The work on our "Life List" for this website continues. It will take a while.

Robert

photo courtesy of keasley